Report: Ranking of Content Management Systems for Global and Multilingual Scenarios

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Jun 8, 2010

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Common Sense Advisory analyst firm recently released their rankings of 16 content management systems attempting to answer the following question: “Which CMS delivers the best support for multilingual and multiregional use?”

The firm looked at a variety of functions that matter most in managing multilingual websites, trying to deduce which CMSs do the best job in managing global information.

Evaluation Criteria

By looking at features and functions, organizational capabilities and other criteria, the analyst firm scored the solutions based on the following four criteria:

Multilingual content handling
Multiregional process management
Multilingual user support
Resources for multiregional implementation.

Then they rated Web CMSs for completeness of support along each criteria, scoring each requirement on a scale of 1 to 4, where a score of 4 represents full-featured capability and 1 indicates minimal or missing support.

Finally, after adding up points for each criteria, they divided that number by the number of factors present in the scoring matrix. The results were published in the 30-page report.

Defining Global Content Management

Common Sense Advisory defines Global content management (GCM) as:

… the business processes and system software used to create, approve, transform, re-purpose, store, and distribute multilingual text, images, and other digitized information. GCM process typically orchestrates the activities of a distributed workforce – one that is not only geographically dispersed but also involves resources both inside and outside the organization. Users of GCM technology also expect systems to interoperate and exchange content and work data with other systems of record, including databases, customer relationship management, and enterprise resource planning.

Then, they identified three common use cases — for web, technical materials and specialized content for WCM, CCM and ECM.

ECM in their terminology is “an overarching category whose proponents envision a single, unified solution for all content processing and management needs.”

Web content management involves files or database content in HTML, XML, or related tagged formats, including multimedia that increasingly challenge both content management systems and the translation management solutions that support multilingual workflow.

Component Content Management (CCM) is used by an ever increasing cadre of technical publications departments, involves database content – most often in an XML data format.

Global CMSs Analyzed in the Report

Here’s a look at CCM, WCM and ECM vendors who were analyzed in the report:

CMS Products Analyzed for This Report, Source: Common Sense Advisory, Inc.

Who’s Who in Global Content Management?

CCM and ECM Rankings for Global Users and Implementation, Source: Common Sense Advisory, Inc.

WCM Rankings for Global Users and Implementation, Source: Common Sense Advisory, Inc.